Visitors just expect to be able to pinch and zoom images on their phones and tablets. That’s why it’s so amazing that out of the dozens of WordPress Lightbox plug-ins, I could only find one that handled this smoothly. Most either didn’t allow pinch and zoom or just went crazy if you tried. So which Lightbox plug-in features pinch and zoom? UniteGallery. This fully responsive Lightbox plug-in features several gallery types, but I find that Tile Grid to render the fastest so that’s what I use. I also turn off all of the extra stuff like borders, shadows, etc. to make things as fast as possible. You can specify what images appear in the gallery, but I just use the Jetpack gallery tools and add unitegallery=galleryname to the shortcode. For example:
[gallery unitegallery="Portfolio" type="rectangular" link="file" ids="1000, 1001, 1002, 1003"]
This way, should I ever stop using UniteGallery, they will default back to normal Jetpack galleries.
The developer is very responsive and accommodating. When I asked about automatically opening a Lightbox slideshow when the page loads he added the feature in a day. I’m hoping he adds a global option so all galleries use UniteGallery instead of having to specifiy it every time, as shown above.
If the gallery has a lot of images, it can be a little slow to render. The developer is working on speed improvements so I’m hoping for better performance in the future.
Anyways, I highly suggest you try UniteGallery. There is a lite version you can try. I believe it limits the number of images in a gallery. The full version is only $19 which is a deal for what it does. It works with native Media Library images so it’s easy to test on a site. The mobile pinch and zoom works perfectly.
UPDATE:
2015-11-03: One caveat. I’ve noticed that you cannot long-press an image and then save it on a mobile device. According to the developer, this just cannot be done. Google Photos (using Safari) doesn’t do it either, so I’m assuming it’s just not possible. Oh well, I wouldn’t trade it for pinch and zoom!